Skyrim can feel like a lonely and loveless place sometimes. Despite the abundance of NPCs and followers, it's easy to feel unappreciated and unloved; a solitary wanderer in a hostile and expansive land full of surly individuals. Sure, you can become the head of a guild or a master assassin, but your new friends have to like you - not because of who you are , but because you're their boss. Not to mention that you can kill dragons and eat their souls.

And yet, lovelorn players soon discovered that Skyrim harboured an interesting little secret. Deep in the heart of thief-ridded Riften lurks a priest of Mara, the Goddess of love, from whom you can buy an unassuming little amulet that slightly buffs your Restoration skill. Nothing seems to change once you don this humble trinket... but after a while, everything starts to get a little... weird.

And more than a little sexy.

Yes, the Amulet Of Mara is a fun optional extra in an enormous game, but it's also so much more. It's a powerful narrative device and a shining beacon for the relationship choice in videogames - and it's high time we told you exactly why we love it.

Valve Celebrate User Creativity With Price Slash

Budding practitioners of science have created 35,000 maps in Portal 2’s new puzzle maker, The Perpetual Testing Inititive, after it was released on Tuesday. To celebrate this achievement, Valve have cut the price on both Portal 2 and Skyrim, both of which take advantage of the Steam Workshop. That isn’t all that is on offer this weekend though, and we have a full round-up after the jump.

Bethesda reckons that details about Skyrim DLC could be released as soon as "next week"... but an intrepid Bethesda forum member has discovered some exciting potential tidbits that might shed some light on what to expect from the mysterious expansion.

Ever dreamt of shouting "Fus Ro Dah!" at your television and catapulting a Nord off a cliff with the power of your voice? Well it looks like you'll get to do just that now that Skyrim on Xbox 360 is to be patched with "more than 200 voice commands".

PC Skyrim owners can now download and test the beta for patch 1.4.26, which promises to fix a few extra issues that are still floating around.

To get involved, open 'Settings' under your Steam account tab, open 'Beta Participation' and select the 'change' option. From there, you can opt into the Skyrim beta - triggering a restart and download. Remember that, since the patch is in beta, there could potentially be some problems along the way (hopefully not too many backwards dragons, mind).

We've got the full changelog below, including tweaks that make downloading mods more stable and fix various enchanting niggles.

Chugging PS3 performance (due to save file size amongst other factors) was one of Skyrim's few crushing flaws, and the recently-released v1.4 patch contains what should hopefully be a permanent solution to the problem. However, Bethesda's Nick Breckon has revealed another choice tip that should help to maximise performance for PS3 players - and fix the issues as fast as possible.

1. To ensure the fastest jump in performance after applying the patch, be sure to first create a new manual save by entering the save menu and choosing “save game.” You should then restart your PlayStation 3 before continuing to play.

2. If you encounter strange behavior while playing immediately following application of the patch, do not be alarmed – this is a temporary effect of Skyrim scripts correcting themselves after the update. Once this process runs its course, be sure to make a new save and restart your PlayStation 3.

Bethesda have delivered a preview video showing off some of the features that will be available to creators and modders once the Creation Kit for Skyrim gets released on Steam.

The new video features Production Director, Ashley Cheng, introducing the Creation Kit itself and also highlighting some of the new features that will be made available to our modding community through the Skyrim Workshop on Steam. The Creation Kit is essential a user friendly release of the same suite of tools that Bethesda Game Studios used to create The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in the first place, and it will be a free download via Steam soon.

The idea behind the Skyrim Workshop is that users will be able to easily upload, download, and install their mods. We fully expect the PC crowd to go absolutely nuts for this and we can't wait to see what the the mod community come up with.

Fourth Time Lucky?

Having penned quite a few articles now since Skyrim's release in November of last year regarding the slew of technical issues players continue to encounter, I count my blessings that my forty odd hours or so spent wandering the Nord's native land the worst glitch I encountered was the occasional crash and a backwards-flying dragon. Which, I must say, was sort of amazing to witness. Bethesda has promised, however, that the lag PS3 players have been reporting in ever-increasing numbers will be addressed by the upcoming 1.4 patch.

They broke the news on Twitter, which revealed patch 1.4 is set for release this month, so expect it within the next two weeks or so. Speaking on their official website, Bethesda revealed they've been "reaching out" to collect as much data as possible on Skyrim's glitch-riddled issues, and revealed that they've isolated a few perpetrators, namely auto-saving in the background - which can be deactivated - redundant AI cycles and the "dynamic system memory allocation". We hope to have some better news to report soon. [Bethesda]